"When sparrows build and the leaves break forth My old sorrow wakes and cries"
About this Quote
Spring is supposed to be nature's redemption arc, but Ingelow flips the script: renewal arrives as an insult. The line hinges on a small, precise cruelty - sparrows building and leaves breaking forth are the most ordinary signs of life getting on with itself. That ordinariness is the point. Nothing dramatic has to happen for grief to return; the world simply resumes its seasonal habits, and the speaker is left out of step.
The craft is in the verbs. "Build" and "break forth" suggest purposeful energy, almost a bustling domesticity. Against that, "wakes and cries" turns sorrow into a creature with its own circadian rhythm, roused by the very evidence of vitality. It reads like a memory-triggered grief response before anyone had clinical language for it: the senses register spring, the body returns to loss. The old sorrow is not resolved; it is merely dormant, waiting for cues.
Ingelow was writing in a Victorian literary culture that prized sentimental lyricism but also trafficked in disciplined restraint. This couplet balances both. The diction stays plain, nearly biblical in cadence ("break forth"), yet the emotional mechanism is modern: recurrence, not catharsis. Subtextually, the speaker's pain may be tied to a past spring - a death, a departure, a love that once felt like budding life. Nature doesn't console; it rehearses the scene, and the heart replays its worst moment on schedule.
The craft is in the verbs. "Build" and "break forth" suggest purposeful energy, almost a bustling domesticity. Against that, "wakes and cries" turns sorrow into a creature with its own circadian rhythm, roused by the very evidence of vitality. It reads like a memory-triggered grief response before anyone had clinical language for it: the senses register spring, the body returns to loss. The old sorrow is not resolved; it is merely dormant, waiting for cues.
Ingelow was writing in a Victorian literary culture that prized sentimental lyricism but also trafficked in disciplined restraint. This couplet balances both. The diction stays plain, nearly biblical in cadence ("break forth"), yet the emotional mechanism is modern: recurrence, not catharsis. Subtextually, the speaker's pain may be tied to a past spring - a death, a departure, a love that once felt like budding life. Nature doesn't console; it rehearses the scene, and the heart replays its worst moment on schedule.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sadness |
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